Letterboxing in Marblehead, MA

Letterbox #1 – Marblehead Neck Light Tower

If you aren’t familiar with Marblehad, the Neck is a small island off its eastern coastline reached by a short bridge. Just before you head onto the bridge, take notice of Devereux Beach on your right. It’s a great beach with free parking this time of year and it has the added bonus of a playground. If the kids still have some energy left in them after a day of letterboxing, this might be just the place to let them burn off the rest of it before the drive home.Your first stop is at the Chandler Hovey Park and Light Tower. Park(free) in the lot and follow the instructions until you hit pay dirt. With a little luck, you’re kid(s) will find the tupperware box, and the scene will unfold to look something like this:

Photo Credit: Chris Crandall

Tip: This park is right on the ocean and if you happen to visit during the spring or fall, be prepared for some blustery weather. Even if you think it’s plenty warm, pack some sweaters or fleece so the little ones can cover up if they get cold.

…

Photo Credit: Chris Crandall

Letterbox #2 – Marblehead Neck Wildlife Sanctuary

Believe it or not, even on the tiny, exclusive chunk of land that is Marblehead Neck, where the houses’ garages give our houses square footage envy, they’ve managed to preserve a sizable trail system inland that provides a completely different experience from the rugged shoreline you will encounter at the light tower. Grab the instructions for this letterbox and drive the 1/2 mile to the trailhead. If you are like us, you’ll follow the instructions to the pond pictured above, walk up and past it a few times, scratch your head, re-read the instructions more times than you need to, look for the rock with the plaque on it, and eventually realize…it ain’t there no more. Oh well. What can you do? Sometimes these things work out, other times they don’t. But guess what? We were on a hiking trail, in our second outdoor spot of the day, as a family. So we challenged the kids, can you hike the entire loop? We hiked around the loop, found some great marshy bridge walks…

sat down, shared some apples, used the sun and a magnifying glass to burn a leaf(bad parenting?), listened to the birds, and watched in amazement as a group(flock? formation?murder?) of dragon flies descended upon our picnic. It was a tremendous moment. We couldn’t get over how cool it was to have these iridescent insects all around us…it was quite a moment, and it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t failed to find the letterbox.

In truth, it wasn’t a great a moment for all of us. Our eldest isn’t all that fond of bugs these days (we’re working on it). But some day, she’ll look back on that experience and smile….Good talk Rus.

The point is, even if your forray outside doesn’t go exactly according to plan, there are still opportunities to enjoy the experience of being outside with your family. And showing them you can roll with the letdowns and still have a blast anyway is probably the best lesson they’ll learn all weekend. Assuming, of course, they aren’t preoccupied with fleeing the dragonfly infested marsh you brought them to.

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We deployed our newsites about two weeks ago to do some initial field testing. Then, this past Friday, started communicating their availability to out existing subscribers and to our friends on Facebook.

And there was much celebration.

Chris celebrated by heading outside with his daughters and building a snowman.

I gotta say, that just may be the most perfect snowman I’ve ever seen. I’m willing to bet he’s compiled a snowman decoration kit for times like this, and, if so, he should write about that in time for next winter.

Meanwhile, the snowstorm left 16 inches on snow on my property. After clearing off my driveway, I joined my wife at the neighbors house, where we proceeded to celebrate with…

Then Saturday came and the day after the storm brought 45 degrees and clear, sunny skis. A perfect day for spring sledding.

Last thought. Chris and I have been so heads down in getting the first version of boston.outdoorfunclub.com out there that we didn’t realize that we were starting to share it with people on the same weekend of SXSW Interactive. Which means there’s about 13,684 other products and services being unleashed this weekend and they’re all trying to grab your digital attention span.

And no, we’re not in Austin for SXSW. We’d rather be here, getting the next issue ready to share with you.

Outdoor Fun Club 1.0

Last week was significant one for Outdoor Fun Club. We updated our homepage and unveiled our Boston content archives at boston.outdoorfunclub.com. The Boston site represents the first of many regional sites we plan to roll out in the future. Each site will be rich with actionable outdoor inspiration to encourage and facilitate experiencing the great outdoors while making lifetime memories.

For the past year, we’ve been writing articles and publishing a weekly email newsletter for people in the Greater Boston area. We’ve covered a number of hikes, including hikes you can even try at night! We published a memory making plan for a day of bicycling on Plum Island. Last summer, there was the first hand account of trying to find a secret beach on Cape Cod. We’ve also explored some weekend outings to Cape Ann, The Berkshires, and Stowe. All of those articles and much more are now available at boston.outdoorfunclub.com.

We’ve worked hard to provide a content experience that can be consumed equally on your desktop, tablet, and smartphone browsers. We’re the first to say that it’s far from perfect. We’ve got lots of ideas and plans for improving your experience and interaction with our content. We also understand that there is much work for us to do to achieve our mission of helping you get outdoors to make memories with your friends and family. These are the nascent days of Outdoor Fun Club. We’re just getting started.

Launching the Boston edition of Outdoor Fun Club

We’re in the process of launching the Boston web edition of Outdoor Fun Club. Should be any day now. Just need to dot some I’s and cross some T’s. Our weekly email will resume publishing not too long after that.

Those of you who have been with us since the beginning (coming up on a year), thanks for sticking with us.